“Hope Springs”: So Tactful, So Unwatchable

Who concocted the script of “Hope Springs”—a committee at the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy? No, the screenplay was written by one Vanessa Taylor, a young woman who must be a very nice person. The film, a rehab job on a beached marriage, displays the most tender respect, the most exquisite tact, and yet it would be completely unwatchable—an outright embarrassment—with any other actors than Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep. The film begins in Omaha, and I will mind my manners, because the last time I made a crack about Omaha, a group of local boosters came down on my head. In lovely Omaha, then, in a split-level ranch house—yellow with green shutters—Kay (Streep), makes the same breakfast (two eggs sunny-side up, a strip of bacon) every morning for her husband, Arnold (Jones), who comes downstairs in his white shirt and tie, reads the paper, and heads off to work at an accounting firm after giving Kay a curt word and maybe a peck on the cheek. At night, he falls asleep in his recliner while watching golf on TV, and she frets behind him, trying to get his attention. They have been married for thirty-one years. Eventually, they go off to separate bedrooms.

This sort of marital dead end was a beginning point of several screwball comedies of the thirties and forties—where marriages often needed a jolt—and even in “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House,” a surprisingly powerful picture from 1948 (the therapy there was constructing a house in Connecticut—the picture became a comic horror story). But those films were all satirical, rambunctious, dizzy: adventure of some sort brought life and sex back into a marriage. In this film, it’s a trip to the medicine cabinet. Kay and Arnold are presented as the dullest, safest, most frightened couple you can imagine, the image of frozen bourgeois respectability and timidity. Neither says what they’re thinking or feeling. And the director David Frankel treats their soul-deadening routines by simply repeating them; he never accelerates the tempo or formalizes their life into a style. After a while, the plot lurches forward: Kay, lovelorn and close to despair, persuades a very grumpy and reluctant Arnold to go for marital therapy in a quaint, highly photogenic town on the Maine coast called Hope Springs, where they are attended by Dr. Feld, played by Steve Carrell, wearing a straitjacket of earnestness. In the forties, the worshipful American movies made about priests at least teased them a bit. Dr. Feld is a god of therapy, faultless, good-humored, patient, ready for any setback. He smiles at the couple, and the counselling begins.

And goes on and on, session after session, step after step, exercise after exercise, encouraging smile after encouraging smile. We see their initial reluctance to admit that they have a problem, and Arnold’s furious impatience—he thinks the therapy business is a scam—followed by Kay’s increasing admission of how unhappy she is. Arnold can’t bear being touched; he’s locked tight as a safe, so they have to learn to put their arms around each other, which, all in all, doesn’t seem like much of a challenge. Kay is also inhibited; she has a problem, it seems, with oral sex, and the doctor recommends—no, you will have to discover the solution on your own (it involves going to a French movie playing at a local theatre). “Hope Springs” could be shown in clinical workshops, in psychology departments, in group therapy. I’m not sure, however, that the movie should be allowed into theatres where adults might see it—it’s just too matter-of-fact and unimaginative. It dulls the senses; the awakening pleasures it celebrates are mortifyingly tame—for instance, Kay’s enchantment when Arnold, who’s also a skinflint as well as irascible, sees the light and takes her out to a decent dinner (with wine, no less).

I know that there are millions of couples at a dead end, and dead periods in the best of marriages, and that such dilemmas might be the subject of an honest, even stirring piece of work. No less than Ingmar Bergman did his epic six-part TV series, “Scenes from a Marriage,” about the ups and downs of two people who are often at odds. But “Scenes” had the benefit of Bergman’s volatile temperament, his theatrical urgency. In “Hope Springs,” Kay and Arnold are too fearful to work up a good quarrel. What the picture has going for it, of course, is our curiosity about the stars—what they imagined they were doing in this thing. Both Streep and Jones have played so many extraordinary people that playing someone ordinary could have been a kind of gentle scandal—a look at the everyday banality that even the highly gifted must experience. But the script doesn’t let them explore very far. It’s not their fault: they don’t condescend to the roles. Jones, who looks worn on the best of days, is leathery, sardonic, cut off—Arnold’s nasty ill temper is the only sign of life in the movie. Streep has added wrinkles and weight to play Kay—she looks frumpish in a mop of hair, print dresses, hideous glasses. She speaks in a tiny voice and manages hesitation and evasion beautifully; she always seems to be swallowing her words. If only the movie had let her break out, it might have actually been about something. “Hope Springs” is so constrained that, in the end, it celebrates repression.

Photograph: courtesy of Sony Pictures.

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.